


Impossible Death

by gaslightgallows (hearts_blood)



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Case Fic, Established Relationship, F/M, Gen, Murder Mystery, Partnership, Secrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-02
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-05-17 21:57:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5886856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearts_blood/pseuds/gaslightgallows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A dark and stormy night, a cold case from 1914, and Melbourne’s two most dedicated investigators. Can they find the solution?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Impossible Death

**Author's Note:**

> Don't read the end notes first. ;)

Jack Robinson sat alone in his office, meditating over a solitary whisky. It was late, nearly eleven at night, and for the most part, the station was quiet. The day’s take of drunks and petty crooks were downstairs in lock-up, with the unlucky constables who had drawn night duty watching over them. Outside, rain pelted down on Melbourne. Inside, the clock on his mantel ticked on steadily, dependably. 

Resting on his red crocodile-skin-patterned blotter, a worn buff-coloured accordion file sat in the circle of yellow light thrown by Jack’s desk lamp. It was tied neatly with delicate-looking red string and had clearly been much handled over the years. Written in shaky black ink across the flap was the legend, ‘Finch Murder, 1914’. Beside it stood a second tumbler, empty. 

The clock ticked the minutes away. Five minutes to eleven… four… three… two.

At one minute to eleven, Jack heard the door to the station shudder under several hard demanding thumps. The constable on night desk duty hurried to unbolt the doors. “Miss Fisher!” the young man sputtered. 

“Hallo, Jim!” she greeted Constable Armstrong, her jolly tone undiminished by either the rain or the late hour. “Is the Inspector in? I believe he’s expecting me.”

“Miss, I’m not sure—wait, please—”

Jack looked up at the commotion approaching his office, and smiled. “Miss Fisher. Right on time.”

Phryne paused in his doorway. It was always nice to see Jack be pleased to see her, but she’d never seen him look quite so calm and accepting of her presence in his office. Their relationship had grown by leaps and bounds since her return from England, in many varied and wonderful ways, but he was still very careful to maintain at least the illusion that she was nothing more than a civilian meddling in police business. There was a very strict police commissioner to stay on good terms with, after all, even if the new superintendent was a lenient and understanding man and very willing to let Jack continue working with meddling civilians, if it meant he maintained the station’s impressive record. At the very least, Jack had to _pretend_ to be annoyed when she barged into his office. 

But tonight he looked pleased. Even… eager. There was a touch of smugness in his smile, a hint of a dare in his blue eyes, and the energy in the small room was low and pulsing and invigorating. Not sexual (Phryne was sensitive to such emanations), but a vague sense of… challenge. “Hello, Jack,” she greeted him softly. 

“Thank you, Armstrong,” Jack said, rising from his chair, “Miss Fisher and I have business to attend to. Close the door, please.”

The boy looked from his boss to the beautiful society woman for a moment or two, and then simply did as he was told. There were all sorts of rumours about the inspector and Miss Fisher, but if even the brass in Russell Street knew about them and didn’t mind, well, it wasn’t any business of his.

Phryne tossed her dripping umbrella into a corner. She pulled off her gloves and laid her purse on Jack’s desk, and as soon as the door was closed, she glided happily into his arms for a proper greeting. “Mmm… hello Jack,” she murmured against his lips. 

“Miss Fisher,” he rumbled softly, permitting himself a moment or two to enjoy the sensation of her body molded promisingly against his. “Thank you for coming.”

“You know me, Jack,” she replied, looking up with a sly grin. “Always up for trouble.”

“I’m aware,” he said. “Please, sit down. I need your help.”

“Oh, you do know the way straight to a lady’s heart. Those are my second-favorite words coming from you.” Phryne unpinned her hat and set it carefully on the corner of Jack’s desk, and sat down, eying the worn dossier with unvarnished curiosity. “May I?”

“Please.” Jack filled the empty tumbler and set it at her elbow. He refilled his own glass and sat back in his chair, watching Phryne begin to examine the sixteen-year-old case file. 

“This has been very well-thumbed,” she noted, untying the string carefully. “A cold case?”

“As cold as the South Pole. I inherited it from my predecessor here. Every so often when I have a few moments, I take it out and rattle my brains over it, but with very little success. Finally, I realized that it is precisely the sort of case that you specialize in. So I am asking for your expert opinion, Miss Fisher.” 

An expression of quiet surprise settled over Phryne’s face. “Thank you, Jack,” she said quietly. It wasn’t the first time he had asked for her help on a case, but it always gave her a feeling of warm respect and camaraderie. “Will you tell me about the case?”

“Certainly. The facts are these: Stephen Finch was the owner of a small tailor shop in North Richmond. Unmarried, without family or close friends. He had no employees and worked alone. He was known as a retiring, paranoid fellow, always kept the door of his shop locked from the inside, to the point where customers had trouble consulting him or retrieving their orders. He had no known enemies, and the understanding among the neighbors was that he was afraid of burglars. On the afternoon of April tenth, nineteen-fourteen, his next-door neighbor, a woman called Betty Rudd, heard sounds of a scuffle. She summoned the assistance of a nearby constable. 

“He couldn’t open the door, and discovered that the windows were nailed shut from the inside.”

Phryne looked up from her perusal of a smudged newspaper clipping. “From the inside?”

Jack nodded. “In the end, the constable – Rodgers, was his name – had to squeeze a skinny local boy through the transom over the door. It was the only thing that was open. Rodgers popped him in and he unlocked the door. Inside, they found thirty-eight-year-old Stephen Finch lying dead in the middle of the floor, with three gunshot wounds, two in his arm, one of which was powder-burned, and one in his head.”

“So he committed suicide.”

“That was Rodgers’ initial thought as well. There was only one problem. Look at the photographs.”

Phryne bent her head over the gory black-and-white prints and studied them intently for a few minutes. “There’s no gun,” she realized. 

“There was no gun. Finch never owned a firearm of any kind, and in fact was known to be terrified at the very thought of them.”

“A robbery, then.”

Jack pursed his lips and ruffled through the papers. “According to the search made of the premises, nothing was missing from the shop. Finch had money in his pockets and in the till, and there were expensive fabrics and embellishments that would have brought a good price at any pawn shop. No other fingerprints were found in the shop except Finch’s. What’s more…” Jack handed Phryne the constable’s report and pointed to a neatly-written line, “he had a hot iron on a shirt on his work table. It hadn’t had time to scorch the cloth.” 

Phryne felt the hair on the back of her neck prickle. “It almost sounds like you’re suggesting Finch was killed by a ghost.”

“ _I’m_ not suggesting that, but it makes more sense than the solution the papers came up with. Look at the article from the _Argus_.”

She found the clipping and read it aloud. “‘The only solution which seems to fit all of the relevant facts is that an extremely thin circus gymnast, for reasons unknown and without attracting attention from any of the bystanders in the busy street, ascended the frame of the door, crawled through the narrow transom, shot Mr. Finch for reasons unknown, though perhaps having to do with a dispute over a tailoring account, and then fled by means of the same route.’ Well, that’s simply ridiculous!” Phryne slapped the slip of newsprint on the desk and looked disgusted. “Even if that were remotely possible, why wouldn’t this mystery gymnast simply _unlock_ the door once he was inside?”

“Perhaps he thought it would attract attention,” Jack suggested, dry as a martini. “But to be honest, the theories my predecessor came up with weren’t much better. The best he could do was to surmise that the killer somehow managed to shoot Finch through the transom.”

“Three times. In the middle of the afternoon.”

“I told you it wasn’t much better.”

“But Jack, look at the coroner’s report.” Phryne pawed through the papers and retrieved the short handwritten summary of Finch’s injuries. “This says that Stephen Finch was shot at close range. He had powder burns on his arm!” She found the manila envelope labeled “Shirt” and shook out its contents. She paused to pull her gloves back on and then spread the yellowed linen garment out on Jack’s desk, pointing out the bullet holes, the powder burns, the bloodstains. Something about the shirt tugged oddly at her mind, but she pushed it away for the moment. “So unless he was standing directly under the transom – and continued standing upright through at least two bullets – he couldn’t have been shot from the transom.”

“That doesn’t work, either. He was found in the middle of the floor. Believe me, Phryne, I have memorized every single aspect of this case since I took over this desk. It’s practically unsolvable and utterly maddening.”

“My favorite kind,” Phryne replied promptly. Her green eyes were alight with intelligence and concentration. “Do you know what perplexes me most about this case, Jack?” she said, after fifteen or twenty minutes in silent study of the evidence before her. 

“What?”

“The speed of the murderer’s escape. If someone wanted Finch dead in his shop that badly, they would find a way to get in and out without attracting attention. But to flee the scene of the crime, with the murder weapon, so quickly that the cloth under the hot iron wasn’t even scorched by the time police showed up.” Phryne read the constable’s report again. Something about it was… not right. She reached for the feeling but it slipped away. She took refuge in more obvious questions.

“Are we sure it was murder?” she murmured. 

“What else could it be?” Jack sat up sharply, his feet thumping the worn wooden floorboards. “There was no weapon.”

“The local boy they shoved through the transom could have removed the gun,” Phryne suggested, though without much conviction. “Was he well-known to Finch?”

“No one was well-known to Finch. He didn’t mingle with anyone. The boy had no reason to hide or remove the evidence.”

“…There’s always the favorite of detective story writers,” she continued, ignoring Jack’s pointed groan, “the suicide weapon attached to the rope. Finch could have shot himself and an accomplice outside could then have pulled the rope and the gun through the open transom and then gotten away with it.”

“There’s no evidence of an outside accomplice, or an outside anything. And Finch hated guns, Phryne. Even if he was suicidal, why would he choose that method? And been so incompetent as to have shot himself twice in the _arm_ before putting the gun to his temple?” 

“All right, then could the killer have been inside after all? He could have shot Finch and then gone outside and turned the key in the inside lock by means of a string through the transom.”

Jack shook his head. “The key of the door was inside the till.”

“Damn.” Phryne rubbed her forehead, still staring at the constable’s report. Something… something… It nagged at her, the way the shirt had nagged at her. “Then… maybe Finch _was_ shot through the transom, and the powder burns were from something else?” Jack silently raised his eyebrows. “No, you’re right,” she huffed. “Oh, I’m grasping at straws with this, Jack!”

“Don’t take it personally,” he soothed. “I’ve been at this since ‘twenty-four, and the man who was here before me retired and died without solving it. You’re not going to figure it out in forty-five minutes.”

“Forty-five…?” Phryne blinked and twisted round to look at the clock on the green mantel. “Oh dear lord, it’s nearly midnight.”

“I hope you don’t think I’ve been wasting your time, Miss Fisher,” said Jack, overtly courteous.

“Of course not.” She slumped in her chair and eyed the whiskey, then glanced at the papers on the desk instead, rather hoping they would make sense this time. Instead, she found that the constable’s report and the investigating detective’s report and the coroner’s findings were all blurring together before her eyes. “Ugh, everything’s starting to look the same.” Then she frowned.

“Time for a little mental lubrication,” Jack suggested, picking up her untouched whiskey and offering it to her. 

“No… no, Jack, that’s it! These reports—they’ve been bothering me since I sat down. They’re all wrong!”

He almost looked insulted. “What do you mean, ‘they’re wrong’? These are official police documents, Miss Fisher.”

“They’re _forged_ ,” Phryne said firmly.

“Excuse me?”

She shoved the three written reports under his nose. “Jack. Look at the writing. Look at the signatures.”

He looked at the papers, and then at her, with a questioning air.

“They’re all the same handwriting. The constable’s report, the detective’s, the coroner’s—all the same!”

“Oh, for… it’s probably just the copyist’s handwriting.”

“Copyists don’t typically forge signatures,” said Phryne. “Jack! I know this sounds mad, but I think this is definitely a murder—one that a police officer committed.”

He stared at her for a moment or two, slack-jawed. “My God,” he murmured thoughtfully, “I never thought of that. Do you know, I never once thought of that… But there’s nothing to preclude it. It’s possible…”

“Jack! I think we’ve cracked the case!”

“It’s entirely possible.”

“Why are you just _sitting_ there? This could break your cold case wide open! We’ve got to follow up these leads, we’ve got to find where Constable Rodgers is now, we’ve got to… Why are you smiling?”

Once more, Jack indicated the whiskey he had poured for her. “During the war,” he began, in a conversational tone that baffled Phryne, “I was laid up in hospital for a time. You know all about that, though. While I was there, I got to know another chap, an English fellow who’d spent a good deal of time in America. We all had our ways of dealing with things out there, you know, and his was riddles. Day in, day out, nothing but riddles and brain-teasers and tongue-twisters. One day, he comes up to me with the queerest grin, and tells me, ‘You’re a copper, Robinson. Mysteries are your bread-and-butter. So figure this one out: There’s a man trapped in a box. He’s staring at a man in a mask. He has three matches. How does he get out?’ Phryne, I tried for _days_ to figure it out. I tried physics, chemistry, law, literature… everything. Finally I gave up, and I asked him, ‘What’s the answer?’” 

He paused to moisten his lips. Phryne couldn’t stand it. “Well? What was the answer?”

“It was entirely outside of my purview. And he knew it, the bastard. The answer relies on a knowledge of the sport of baseball.”

“Of course,” Phryne said, a slow smile of reminiscence spreading across her face. “Three strikes, and… you’re out.” 

“I had no idea what that meant. He had to explain it to me, in detail. Months later I was back at the Front and pinned down under a barrage with my friend Lee Gibson—you know Gib.”

“The superintendent?” Phryne’s smile widened. “Does he know about this?”

“Naturally; I had to borrow the dossier from him. Well, we were telling each other stories to distract us from the shelling. I told him the three strikes riddle. He said… well, what he said isn’t repeatable in polite company. But it got us thinking about C. Auguste Dupin and Joseph Rouletabille and locked room mysteries in general. Yes, Miss Fisher,” Jack added, seeing her surprised expression, “I am actually aware of some detective stories.”

“I’m impressed, Jack. I thought you abhorred that genre of fiction.”

“I do,” he said dryly. He raised his whisky to his lips and then gestured with the glass, adding, “Largely because it encourages civilians to think themselves proficient in criminal detection.” He smiled serenely at Phryne’s scowl. “As I said, it set us to thinking. We started trying to create the perfect locked room murder mystery. It was an amusing little intellectual exercise, a bit of fun between two senior constables in the muck and the mud and the horror. We came up with the scenario fairly easily, but having put the body in the room and locked the doors, we’ve been trying to figure out how it got there ever since. That was… oh, fourteen years ago, now.”

“So there’s no answer.”

Jack spread his hands, palms open to heaven. “There’s no answer. The case is made up and I haven’t the damnedest idea how it could have happened.”

“This whole dossier… you fabricated it?”

“When I came home, and came back to work… sometimes it was hard. Gib suggested that we find evidence for our made-up case. I think he was hoping it would give me something else to focus on. We went a bit mad over it, actually. Like little boys collecting cigarette cards.”

Phryne looked at the clutter of official-looking documents, photographs, powder-stained cloth, newspaper clippings. “So you… forged the reports and the coroner’s findings.”

“‘Forged’ is such a loaded word, Phryne. It was a game.”

She picked up the coroner’s report and squinted at something. “Superintendent Gibson wrote this, he must have.”

“You recognize his handwriting?”

“No, but it’s too neat to be yours.”

Jack winced. “Got it in one. We both had access to official paper, of course… and obviously even Gib did a terrible job of it, if you thought the whole murder was a put-up job from the beginning.”

“Well, yes, but not to this extent! What about the bit of shirt with the blood and gunpowder stains?”

“A fragment from my old army uniform shirt. God knows the thing had plenty of both.”

 _That_ was why the shirt had bothered Phryne so much. She’d certainly seen her share of bloodied army-issue shirts… “The photographs?”

“My cousin Emily helped us stage them. The dead man is my friend Alec Wallace, from the Ballarat force.”

“The newspaper clippings?”

“Borrowed a toy printing press from one of Rosie’s nieces.”

“You certainly did your due diligence with your locked-room mystery. All the trimmings, and no solution at the end of it. So that line about wanting my expert opinion was only so much flattery?” Phryne said, her broad grin hiding the disappointment she was trying not to feel. “An added flourish to your story?”

“Not at all,” said Jack firmly. “I did want your opinion. Gib bet me that not even you would be able to solve our little puzzle, but I also wanted to see what you would make of it. I’ve long since come to accept that sometimes a policeman can be a little too hidebound and convinced of his own infallibility. We might well have accidentally included the solution and not even known it.” His blue eyes were warm with friendliness and admiration. “And apparently we did. A police conspiracy, right under our noses.”

Phryne finally reached for her whiskey, but instead of drinking it down, she raised it in a toast. “Jack Robinson, I am… _deeply_ impressed.

“Thank you. I’m tempted to take it to one of your detective story writer friends and see what they can come up with.”

“I’m sure they’d be delighted, but Jack, if it’s a fictitious case, then what was the point of this? If all you wanted was my company, I can think of several more comfortable places than this. Several hundred,” she added, quirking a thin black brow. 

His small smile was almost shy now. “It’s been a quiet couple of weeks in Melbourne. And while it’s been nice to have a chance to breathe, I can see that you’ve been getting restless.”

“…Jack.”

“Not that either of us would wish death on the innocent, but it’s fairly obvious that you’ve been bored without the usual spate of confusing murders. Especially since your record-setting aeroplane voyage.”

“It did set my wandering foot to itching a bit,” Phryne admitted. “But Jack. You don’t need to worry that I’m going to up and leave you again.”

“No?”

“Of course not,” she assured him. She sipped her whiskey slowly, her eyes on his, and then stood up and went round the desk and kissed him firmly. “Next time I go, I’m taking you with me.”

**Author's Note:**

> The locked-room mystery in this story is based pretty much entirely on [a real case from New York City](http://strangeco.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-impossible-death-of-isidore-fink.html%20). The post sourced here was invaluable. (I did my best not to crib the actual text.) The riddle Jack's friend tells is one that I heard eons ago at Girl Scout camp. Clearly, it stuck with me.


End file.
